Nowadays, a large part of customers often use credit card to make purchase. With this kind of payment system, the cardholder can prove his identity thanks to the knowledge of a secret PIN (Personal Identification Number) stored in the card and, if it is not sufficient, thanks to identification papers located in his wallet.
With the advent of electronic commerce (or e-commerce), all schemes executed every days by customers and merchants can be repeated in the electronic world with few modifications and with the setup of new materials and applications.
Identification papers that proves the identity of an end-entity (customer or merchant) are now replaced by digital certificates and classical wallets which are used in the real world are replaced by electronic wallets (also called E-wallets).
The digital certificates are today largely used by the e-commerce community and are out of the scope of this patent application.
The notion of E-wallet, as disclosed for example in “Merkow M. S., Breithaupt J. and Wheeler K. L., “Building SET Applications for Secure Transactions”, Wiley Computer Publishing, 1998” covers a computer application allowing a consumer to store private information (e.g. credit cards numbers, name, address, etc.) on his PC and to retrieve that information quickly and securely for the purpose of online shopping for example.
Various E-wallet systems have been proposed recently. Some of them are dedicated to the storage of digital certificates in order to provide an easy way to make purchase via “macropayment” schemes such as SET (a standardized e-commerce protocol, information about which can be found in “Loeb L., “Secure Electronic Transactions: Introduction and Technical Reference”, Artech House Publishers, 1998”). Among these products are the IBM Consumer Wallet™ (information about it can be found in the internet publication “http://www-4.ibm.com/.software/commerce/payment/wallet.html”) or the GlobeSet Wallet™ (information about it can be found in the internet publication “http://www.globeset.com/Products/Wallet/wallet.shtml”).
Other systems manage digital coins, or tokens, to make “micropayment” transactions, for example to purchase low value items; while others manage several kinds of data (digital certificates as well as digital coins).
However, if we compare the features offered by the current E-wallets to those satisfied by the wallets used in the real world, we can see that a typical wallet proposes more functionality since we can also exchange money from one wallet to another, store tickets, invoices, pictures, etc.
In addition, all current e-commerce protocols need the user's bank account to make purchase and thus, children are left outside of e-commerce activities.
The present invention is therefore directed to the problem of developing a new electronic wallet which provides more functionality than existing electronic wallets and which is more “family-oriented”. Particularly, it should allow children to participate to e-commerce by having their own purse for micropayment transactions and it should allow the same operations as “real-life” wallets (storage of tokens, token transfer facilities between purses, etc.).